Sunday, July 30, 2017

[orcxgxnt] Future and past

Scientists, especially astronomers, in the far future will see a very different universe than we do now and will ponder as huge unknowns things that are observationally obvious to us now. This assumes information about now is not reliably stored into the far future.

Nothing beyond the Local Group of galaxies will be visible. The Cosmological Microwave Background will have become redshifted to invisibility. They will wonder where did they come from? What exists beyond the edge of their (very small) Observable Universe?

Perhaps they are scientists living in the universe's late stage Black Hole Era, living near a black hole, their civilization feeding off its emitted Hawking radiation. They might wonder what flat spacetime is like. It might be practically impossible to leave the vicinity of their black hole using only collected Hawking energy, so they might have a very finite view of their universe.

Next, how are the questions of future scientists similar to questions we have now? We of course wonder about the past conditions of the universe, which would have been observationally obvious to hypothetical life existing then. Did they record any answers for us?